Waiting Heart Emerges?

Can it be? For two weeks now it seems I am me again. How? "The Waiting Heart" that MGF sent me 6 months ago seems to have borne fruit. The butterfly emerging from the chrysalis after two years for Kidd looks like it is finally flying about for me after 3 years of darkness and 9 months of Inner Work . . . why else have I always put the Callas "Madama Butterfly" on the car radio when going in to Anchorage for these last weeks? I never put the inner work and gravitating-in-daily-life to that music together til just now. After a long slog of listening to tapes for my spirit stuck in the tiny pit of the dark well (list of tapes/podcasts follows) all of which appeared to me as if by magic, one by one, came a physical treatment = going to a "canny" Scottish foot reflexologist (who reads!), getting off the blood pressure medicine Diovan, discovering the Bach flower essences, and walking in the very early mornings again. Like the lifting of April 22nd, the new discovery of me July 29th was just something that I noticed---aha! today is different. Two weeks of its unchanging state is enough for me to declare it without fearing a jinx......stay tuned!

Macbook all better...NOT

My Macbook got sick with Random Shutdown Syndrome and kernel panic, and had to go to the repair shop for a new logic board.

For the first time since 1982 I was without a computer--for a week! It was surreal, like being in another dimension. When my Macbook came back, I gave it a big hug! Then I started catching up.

ONE WEEK later, new logic board (no serial number) and ANOTHER RSS later, an hour on the phone with AppleCare, learning I need to do a clean install (the very idea gives me hives) I am not such a happy Apple camper....stay tuned.......

Kinko's tanked on a scan, too--what is it with these top-of-the-line-but-F%#*-the-customer companies???

Fennel Candy

Found candy-coated fennel seeds while taking my beloved Japanese system Dynabook (Windows Me!) to the recylcing center. Great by-product. Now to continue with these sorts of goodies.....I know there is a store in Manhattan, but I didn't bookmark it!

I keep these in a brown paper bag in the closet, but find myself opening the closet and the paper bag for just one more handful.....

African Violet Success

The African Violet has eight flowers! Two more on the way. What a giant, happy success!

African violet petals have a shimmery sheen, like a light layer of glitter has been sprinkled on them—at least the white petals do. On the windowsill they sparkle!

My Great Success

This African violet has been all leaves since it came here in bloom five years ago. I got "how-to" from the 80+ year old friend Mother used to visit with and is now learning computers with my sister (she care for her Alzheimer's husband until he died years ago). So I feel like I have accomplished something recently!

Spring blues

"A paradise of flowers in a violent world and a person is darned lucky who only has the blues and you know that's so."
Garrison Keller, on Salon.com about Iraq

Yep---my itty bitty spring blues pale.......

I live in a place that sends whole battalions of 18-23-year-olds to Irag on a regular basis and schedules funerals on an equally regular basis--gives a more immediate perspective to the news and the blues.

Riverbend, the pseudonym of a young Iraqi woman who blogs from Baghdad tells what we don't read in the paper.

Yep, the basements of the world hold a lot more than a paltry set of the blues.

I Don't Look Like Me

I did the "Self Portrait" experiment, and compared the me I see in the mirror, my image of me, to pictures, and yes, they are opposite. So what you see when you see me, is not what I see and imagine myself to be. Now, this is going to take some thinking about!

What do I look like?

My good friend, Sally Yagi (aka Sarah Louise), was a delight over 30 years in Japan--we discovered early on that we had gone to rival colleges in San Antonio at roughly the same time.....now Sally, over 70, has published her third book of poetry: Poetic Potpourri.

She says these are "discarded" poems from her two earlier books, but this one is by far my favorite.

Here is a very intriguing poem (no, I haven't done the experiment yet):

Self-Portrait

I snapped a photo of myself
while gazing in the mirror
and placed it next to the picture
you shot of me yesterday.
In mine, my left side's on the left
and in yours, it's on the right.

This may be quite obvious
but it just dawned on me
that the me you're seeing
is not the me I see every day.

No wonder when we view
ourselves in snapshots,
you always hear us say,
"That doesn't look like me."

The photo you take
is the 'me' that you know,
but the image in the mirror
is 'me' to me.

Imagine my surprise to realize
the cute gal in my looking glass
is seen by no one else.
It's the stranger
I've been sporting
for everyone to see!

So you can go ahead and laugh
because the joke is on me!

First Copper River Salmon

We had the first Copper River salmon last night (missed Tuesday because the delivery would have been too late for our schedule).....and the leftover on salad tonight. This is the Beaujolais Nouveau of Alaska.....people wait in long lines.....the Copper River salmon run is short, and this is a real treat. Sometimes, life is very very good.

If you care

about books, and are USA-oriented read the French blog, Maitresse, for May 12th. And feast . . . and sigh.

Three years

It is impossible to say what this means.....one lesson has been that three years of caregiving, not to mention 11, is as alien to other people as an itinerary of North Uzbekistan. Where does one start. Who cares? So this evening, when I ran upstairs for a "toast" to me halfway through dinner, nothing happened. That was the point. Here is what I wrote to my sister and her family shortly afterwards:

"Well, I had some, ahem, "prepared remarks," but the opportunity passed at the dinner table. So just let me tell you.....

from this early morning, driving for coffee, I realized I was not feeling celebratory, or even self-congratulatory. I looked at Sleeping Lady, and thought, there is a lot to be thankful for, though, so today should be about being grateful. First, my biggest thank-you is for your generosity. It is something astounding that I think about very often. Then, I thought how lucky I am to be in the middle of such a beautiful place. Nothing is ugly here. I thought about the family I can be part of for awhile. Of course, I am thankful for Mother, but then I have been for a very long time. It is just more intense now, seeing her smile first thing on going in to her room for waking-up. She once put a big Miss Piggy decal on a present she sent me, and I framed it, and still have it in a box in storage: "Smile, it helps you get your way." But Mom smiles because she is happy, and because she is glad for the new day, and for the people caring for her. So was I, today.

So thank you. I have done much less than you have these years, and I know it."

I could write pages about all this one single day means and how it is to live it. But what for?

However, another thought has come to me all day. MGF gave me a week at Manoa Valley Inn, and a dinner at the King's St. Alan Wong's in Hawaii between Japan and here three years ago. I remember every minute as if it were yesterday. I feel thankful. That week, and my three days at the Hilton in January, are my breaks for the last four years. Thank you, MGF.

Tomorrow Year 4 begins. August 1, Year 12 begins for everyone else in the household.

trivial diversion for the post: did you know:
Alaska--The name for the 49th state comes from the Native Aleut language and the name was Alaxsxaq. The Russians simplified it to Alyaska (The Great Land) and the Americans reduced it to Alaska. The Aleut word for their homeland literally means "where the sea waves break upon themselves."

Blog Tours

Who knew? Kevin Smokler invented the virtual book tour back in 2003. Now we run into "Blog Tours"---basically visting/interacting with related blogs in the world over a time frame. Absolutely fun! Built around a theme......it is a mini-tripAroundtheWorld! Some discoveries are Better Late than Never!

So, who do I tell?

In my small world, a new Maryse Condé novel is A Big Thing. I love Martinique, and want to spend time in Guadaloupe, which is MC's home. I spent an evening with MC in my friend's living room in Nishinomiya. I love her. I love her books. She is a mystery. Her translator, Richard Philcox, is her husband, and their marriage is a mystery. But her novels are stupendously wonderful.

So I had to have her latest. "The Story of the Cannibal Woman" (yes, in the original). Wow.

Maryse told me the best Carribbean restaurant in New York is the Bambou...and I went, and it was beyond my dreams ("this cozy, elegant room...reminds me so much of the elegant restaurants in the islands")...now it is "developed" into this dreadful modern thing. Alas. The "old" one was like stepping into Martinique----a lovely home, that is, not the city streets, which have their own charm!

The "old" one was reviewed 11 years ago....so change happens. Alas.

Grizzly Bear Ranch

Julius Strauss posted from Grizzly Bear Ranch, and I asked for a postcard.....and I posted a comment....about GBR being great stop-off on the healing journey.....

The Violence of Soundbites

The US media is being taxed and attacked over their attention to the sensational and to the soundbite. Editorials are with the students who are paying attention to the important things.

In the meantime, Seung-Hui Cho's family sent out an apology letter...knowing Asia, that letter was so so culturally-rooted and so heartfelt and so hit the mark, and the US media will make soundbites of it.

The students at Virginia Tech, and the Seung-Hui family, are in the core of this; the frenzied media looks shabby.

Bricklayers

I heard a joke:

A guy was passing some bricklayers working, and asked, “What’re you doing?”
1st one: “We’re layin’ bricks.”
2nd one: “We’re buildin’ a wall, Ok pal?”
3rd one: “We’re creating a sanctuary, a place where people can come and open up their hearts and maybe find the best part of themselves, maybe find the true meaning of life.”

Now, what the difference among these bricklayers?

The first two are from New York and the third one is from California.

I keep asking my friends here to help me with the bricklaying--how to find storage space, how to find a moving company, how to find.......etc.

But my job is to be from California. Gotta get back in touch with the inner life!

Weather tonight

Yep, at 9:30 p.m. Eagle River AK time, we are 41°F, and so is Paris!!!!!

Weather Forecasts

The forecast today was for snow-and-rain. We had a little sunshine. Weather forecasts are like foretelling Mother's passing---kinda like being at the roulette wheel in Vegas. It is interesting living in that situation totally
......suspended, and needing to believe in a stable Heart that is Waiting.......

I love checking the weather in Eagle River, Tokyo, New York and Paris on my Dashboard. Inevitably, a minimum of two are the same--it can be ER and NYC, it can be Tokyo and Paris, it can be NYC and Paris, etc. etc. etc. Very fun! Right now, Tokyo and NYC are the same. Sometimes, three are the same!

same = within a degree or two

Hard time bloggin'

3 sisters together for the first time since we were little---having a good time--but blogging takes a back seat....so read how we live here in Alaska--the first 5 posts chez Elise
http://www.elisepatkotak.com/

See you later!

Not Knowing What's Coming

"Perhaps it is good that at times we do not know what lies ahead, or we would not attempt it, and failure would be inevitable." Anne Perry, A Christmas Journey, p. 172.

Takes a lot of thought to know if not knowing what lies ahead is good or not . . . now at a new stage of uncertainty, how to plan for the next six months, parameters unclear making living in the present attractive, but something has to be in place and there is a great desert where an image of "where to go from here" should be. If I knew how the next six months would play out, would it help?

"Without Reservations"

MGF sent me a book, Without Reservations, by Alice Steinbach. My mother's name is Alice, and the caregivers all call her "Miss Alice"--my and my daughter's middle name is Alice, so happy convergence. Alice's meeting and subsequent obsession with Naohiro, and her hobnobbing with Japanese, fascinated me, of course, and I was also caught by sentences like, "It was time to let go of worrying about such things as whether or not I looked foolish in a pair of trendy shoes." And naturally I read the Paris chapter first!

Journeys and Passages

Such familiar signposts---journeys and passages. And the final passage is theoretical to all who have not accompanied someone through it. So no need to detail it here, although I wish I could find blogs, lists with caregivers-in-the-final-passage to help vent, all I can say is that it is hard, without 100% support, to keep in balance to see it through. But that is what the inner life is about! I am sorry for myself (fresh pity party!) that it is so alone; yet all of life's major passages are alone, aren't they.

So if I am sporadic, it is not because I don't wanna blog! It's those darn life passages that get in the way!

Decompression

This is how Julius Strauss decompressed.

War correspondent

Got to hear Julian Strauss today....opened a very wide window to the world for me. I can't get the stories out of my head---awesome speech....

Julius blogs right here at Blogger and is writing about being here in Anchorage for a while.....

I wish he'd write about how to decompress after very trying years.....how'd he do it?

High Finalist Broadsided's Switcheroo contest

Broadsided had a Switcheroo contest.

And I entered. And, it seems, if I am reading the msg correctly, "On a more personal note -- we loved what you saw in the artwork and your poem was in our top two," that maybe I was a runner-up. But in their "permission to post this information" message, they said to call myself a High Finalist. Sounds good to me!

"Anna Mueller's 'Dishes' took the day.

My entry is here.

"Chairing Mary"

Seamus Heaney, '95 Nobel Prize laureate, wrote:

CHAIRING MARY

Heavy, helpless, carefully manhandled
Upstairs every night in a wooden chair
She sat in all day as the sun sundialled
Window-splays across the quiet floor.

Her body heat had entered the braced timber
Two would take hold of, by weighted leg and back,
Tilting and hoisting, the one on the lower step
Bearing the brunt, the one reversing up

Not averting eyes from her hurting bulk,
And not embarrassed, but never used to it,
I think of her warm brow we might have once
Bowed to and kissed before we kissed it cold.

Published in The New Yorker, June 27, 2005, and used without permission

Almost two years ago I read this poem and was mightily moved. I was still lifting Mother from chair to bed, to wheelchair, to stair glide, etc. etc. I even made a page with pictures and all.....but, having been raised with non-demonstrative love, I found it impossible to bow to and kiss Mother's warm brow. For a while. One night I kissed Mother's brow at the last relax-and-good-night ritual. Then, recently, I found myself kissing that brow at other times, and always last thing at night. It has become familiar now, what was so difficult and unfamiliar before. Mother always smiles.

Thank you, Seamus Heaney, I'm glad I once could shake your hand.

Onward!

Realized, when an email came addressed to "Onward Kay," that my sign-off had become second nature. When reading Anne Perry's Christmas trilogy, found "Forward regardless." Aha, I'm on to something. And I have my last word all ready.

"Onward" has thorny patches . . . coming to it, resolving a few issues, finding a tad of balance--these are good, right? But they mean accepting what was resisted, and resisted with good reason. ID loss, alien culture, no interest in "me"--resisting these seems good. But to balance, they have to be accepted, and "onward" has to take effect.

It is being an expat all over again. Culture shock is partly resisting ID loss; dealing with alien, unaccepting culture; mental dislocation; fight to assert the Big Self. So, say you become a successful expat, you become a real part of the new culture, and moreover, you are successful there. And happy. It takes a chameleon. This is good. But what is the chameleon's base? Neutral; transparent? No color?

Returning "home" is just another expat experience. Same ID loss, same alien culture (except this one looks frightenly familiar), same mental dislocation, same fight to Be Me.

Yeah, there are people who seem to move effortlessly and successfully in and out of multiple cultures. Are they masking something? Do they have a secret? Or are they masking something?

Rule of thumb says re-entry takes a year for every 5 abroad--well, I am halfway through and it ain't effortless yet. The Big Re-entry is upon me--going back into the new world alone. New expat time....

"Be honest without the thought of Heaven or Hell"

As a lapsed translator and great agonizer over "my miseries," this article in the current New Yorker about Iraqi translators for the Americans has been a jarring read.

There is, of course, much in the long article that will take rereading and pondering. But this quote, from a translator who had it on his wall as a young man at loose ends for lack of a job and a path, stopped me short. Because, in my current inner work, it means to me to be honest in my own mind, in my own stories about my life situation, in my own scenarios, as well in everything I say and do.

I am jarred--and sobered. By the whole article, which is, as New Yorker articles are, you-are-there style, written with people and not just the reporter's observation.

p.s. If you get into the article and are interested in George Packer's interview about writing it, you can see that interview online only.

Do you read?

Then you will love this video!

Blogging skills

After about a month of blogging, it's hard! I want a few people to keep up with me, especially now that a new transition is beginning. But I want the blog to be fun and readable, too. I want to start a public blog, and have spent a little time planning. Whew! It's sort of like starting your own business.....the time sink. What makes a "successful" blog--or is it a "good" blog one wants as #1 goal? These are different.

Boils down to focus--away from the view of the navel and onto the audience. I want to talk endlessly, the blog demands conciseness. And sure enough, in planning, one comes upon the inevitable American artifact, the personality test--what sort of blogger are you. To discover your blogging style. The more you know in advance, the better the blog will be. Like planning for the future, when the future is a moonless night in the desert.

Will blogging be my moonlight?

More GFs read blog

Second, now third, GF aboard. 2nd, Blogger helper, for photos and links (like, it seems there is this thing called a toolbar with stuff called icons at the top of a page on a computer screen; who knew?). GF suggests writing article on return of the expat for The Guardian. Inner life of homing expat? Fodder for a public blog?

3rd, longtime guide on the inner life--3rd, GF, don't smile knowingly. pls!

2nd GF said her Man thinks she's brilliant writer. Understands the writing. Thus, he feels clever. "People like feeling clever." New digression arises. More Anne Perry. Emily Radley dinner party 19th-century political-world London: "It was the greatest compliment to a man to find him interesting, and she knew few who could resist it." Southampton Row

Post à la Gail Scott My Paris.

Delicious Scott sentences fit dilemmas of inner life, "In this manner whiling away the dangerous snare of late afternoon." Oh, that dangerous snare!!! Mine!
"Time passing in stiff little clouds." "Shadow of hotel begetting surrealism."

Good Books and Good Friends are, well, G.

The Blog as Jar in Tennessee

I feel embarrassed about this inner life blog, because I don't like navel-gazing blogs....I went and found a whole bunch of blogs by people my age and they were so boring--sort of the "I had a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich in the garden today and the roses looked nice" variety. But I wanted a place where I could talk (I have maybe one conversation with another person per week) and also to let some people close to me know that I am emerging from the tiny dark place I was being sucked further into. And focus on the inner work I have been doing since November that is really changing me.

I am also afraid of the conflation of religiousness with spirituality--I am surrounded in this town (not in this house) by people who go to church at least twice a week. By BAs (born-agains). I am neither organized religion nor pious, but am afraid of that labeling. Just like the hairdresser will not cut my hair short because she says people here will think I am gay. Scares me because I am sooo not gay. But being surrounded with such folks, and not being in a cosmopolitan world but in a labelers' world, does mess up one's head. Anyhow, at my age, being who I am should problem-free--never was before, but then being an expat was so liberating!

So it turns out to be a blog for me mostly. And it is marvelous---it works in my head sort of like Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Post on post-caregiving

"The 're-entry' phase of caregiving – after the caregiving ends – calls loudly for a post-caregiving support system to help build or rebuild health, skills and confidence for a successful transition back into life – and into the work world," say the Canadians.

Have not so far found much on the Web--lots and lots about transitioning into caregiving, but not out. Maybe it is like someone who has become an expert at all aspects of caregiving and is often encouraged to write a book: "When this is over, do you really believe I'll want to go through it all again doing a book???"

Or Jewell's Journal, "another day of post-caregiving funk." But Jewell's got bootstraps she uses: "So here I was, indulging my angst about not having a back yard or a book project when it hit me: I do have the one thing I've most wanted for years.
Now I have time. And from that, all good things will come."

It's a place to start now that Hospice has come back into our lives. This time it looks like it is for real. Concentration will go to the Great Passage. Post-anything is a theory. But I suddenly see the real spring that sprung me into starting this blog. The Great Passage is upon us. There is light there.

"Beginning as we mean to go on"

Aunt Eva's column for desperate writers, editors and translators included an unforgettable one about "the most important thing is to begin as you mean to go on, and stick to it." I know two people who do this; they not only always have a plan, but a Plan B as well. Not me. I determine to plan first, whether a copyediting job or a Web page or, ahem, a blog. Then enthusiasm takes over like a wave of Puritan Great Awakening and I plunge in, to regret not having begun as I meant to go on.

And always wish I had.

"Darren over at Problogger.net is having a group writing project where bloggers submit what they would do differently if they were to start their blog all over again."

Cuz a lot of people don't begin as they mean to go on. I thought I did when I started caregiving 7 years ago, and moved into it full-time 3 years ago. I was in la-la land.

LARGE-PRINT BOOKS

The two Anne Perrys I wanted at the library were only there in Large Print. Remembering how I got Large Print for the 80+-year-old woman with whom I read novels once a month, and how I found the books impossible to read, I hesitated. But, no choice, so borrowed them.

Oh no! They are perfectly "normal" and comfortable to read. Another step along the road. . . .

Anne Lamott's Grace

Downloaded the podcast of Anne Lamott's interview on Salon and listened while doing my walk around the basement this morning.

Along with tapes, podcasts [and this blog] are saving me from the small black hole that threatens to suck me deeper.

I have liked Anne Lamott since reading her 1995 Bird by Bird about writing (the title comes from a story about starting "small, as their father once advised her 10-year-old brother, who was agonizing over a book report on birds: 'Just take it bird by bird.'"

The podcast was wonderful, hearing two people chatting about something serious, and being balanced about the struggle for spiritual balance. One of the points that hit me where I live just now is
[JW] "But I thought the deal is that if I get to the right spiritual place I will be in perpetual grace. Are you saying [in your new book] instead it's 'Grace eventually,' not 'Grace now,' and not 'Grace permanently'?"
[AL] "I think it's very frustrating and if I were God I would have a completely different system. I would have a magic wand and I would touch people with it, and help them be struck well."

Yes, it is "grace eventually," "satori eventually," isn't it. It has been four months since I got the first tapes to help me begin to turn off then replace the horrid ones turning in my head. And listening to so many, spiritual balance and self-motivation and stress management, I really understood that as far as I have come, I will never get "there." The work will go on forever. Every day it might get easier, but it will take relentless work, even more than "just" meditation, for me to stay in balance. Asking for, working toward, grace doesn't end the pain like buying a winning lottery ticket might.

I just hope getting to a stable spot in the road won't take very much longer. I can maintain after that, but I sure would like to find the center point and settle in for the long haul.

Yet there were some things in the Lamott interview that hit me wrong as I listened, and thought "How can you say that?":

1. One thing you [Lamott] and I [Joan Walsh, interviewer and editor-in-chief of Salon] have talked about is a sense of needing grace as you age, and how "aging gracefully" is something nobody really does.

Me: Really?? You 50-year-olds honestly believe no one really ages gracefully? In an interview about attaining "grace eventually"?

2. And I [Lamott] tease her [89-yr-old Aunt Gertrud who said, "I have lived too long" at the end of a challenging walk] about it and she loves it because she knows she has lived too long, but she still has a lot of pleasure in her life.

Me: Aunt Gertrud can say what she wants, in this case as part of a black-humor exchange with AL, but how can anyone say that someone else has lived "too long."

3. The day after the 2004 election ranks up there for me with days where cherished friends died.

This was inconceivable to me. I am glad I am not a cherished friend of AL!

I hope that when I find the center and live there, I'll have the grace such that thoughts like these will never even be conceived.

Read page 69

Marshall McLuhan recommends that when browsing a book, browse powerfully, then go to page 69 and read it. If you like that page, borrow/buy the book. So far I've not found anyone who says it doesn't work. Purposeful browsing, who knew?

What is the caterpillar thinking?

“As a survivor of a brain injury, Rick Bowie is only too well acquainted with the dramatic life changes it brings.” He has an article on “Change Happens” (look down the list for “Change Happens”) that is just down my transitions alley.

“I’ve often wondered what might go on in the mind of a caterpillar when life in the cocoon begins to come to an end. It is about to lose the safety and support of its environment and its known world is coming to an end. Even if it could see a little further into that unknown mystery of the future, it might not even recognize the beauty of the butterfly which was about to appear. Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese Philosopher, said, “when I let go of what I am I become what I might be.”

Sometimes, when the pity party is in full swing, I feel I am like someone sequestered against their will for a long time. I am not here against my will, but, like the long-sequestered, I now fear dealing with The Outside World and getting the gift of re-taking control. Not having any control over my public or private life and not having dealt with TOW for, now three years, but looking and seeming like an insider, it will be a new re-entry syndrome (the end-of-culture-shock re-entry is like this).

Rick goes on to another metaphor, the compost heap of life.

“Over a period, the heap gathers to itself all kinds of unwanted leftovers and wasted refuse. All it needs is time and warmth, and out of it will grow the most delicious tomatoes and pumpkins, the seeds of which at some time were also thrown away as waste. The same thing has been said in many different words by many different people. Sigmund Freud wrote somewhere that “one day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”. The philosopher Nietzsche said ‘unless there be an element of chaos within, you will never give birth to a dancing star’”.

BUT, nice as imagining the happy retrospect when it will all become beautiful and when one will be as a dancing star, this focus is the transitioner's hurrying-to-the-other-side-of-the-street" mistake.

"Transition is the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, suffering the confusing nowhere of in-betweenness, and launching forth again in a new situation. It is the natural process of disorientation and reorientation that marks the turning points of the path of growth. It would be great if transition was like the teleporter of science fiction, where one simply walks into a cabinet and says the equivalent of “beam me up, Scotty”, and whoooosh, and we were there". William Bridges makes much of this.

Hence, the waiting heart, staying with the waiting heart.

Grace and Flair

Did it again. Magnanimously gave up my weekly day off and physical therapy/weekly social hour (in Anchorage!) to do backup for the house situation of the pre-appeal telephone conference tomorrow about the cutbacks to Mother's care provider hours. Then, kept my end of the deal, but Grace and Flair must have left for South America last night because they were not in evidence in my behavior today. Yes, Mother had an agitated night; believe me, a Crone Short On Sleep can Rise To The Occasion, but with Grace and Flair? NOT! . . . more DNA searches!!!

Sassy, Funny Blog

I wish I could write a blog in the vein of Elise's.

Elise is immediate past president of what used to be Alaska Presswomen and is now Alaska Professional Communicators. I love her book, Parallel Logic. The expat experience, whether Elise in Barrow, Alaska, me in Japan, or mgf in American Samoa. The laugh-out-loud parts are what I envy. Gotta dredge that up out of the creative DNA somehow!

Stuff like Elise writes, at the end of her bio:
"Her primary goal in life now is to live long enough to spend all she has saved for her old age. Thanks to recent economic trends, this may turn out to be much easier than she initially believed possible."

Oops, in 4mgf, where's the sassy, funny part of this post, or any post?

More on prayer

Reading beyond the subject line is daunting, isn't it. But, I am so revolutionized by one sort of prayer as prayer being waiting, a new idea idea for me, that the discovery of a nun-in-the-world, drinking beer, writing a blog, as in the interview in yesterday's paper, seemed intriguing. So I went there. And looked at prayer. And clicked the link. And found goal-oriented prayer. So I left.

And I went to Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace, chapter, Prayer. And I was reassured that religion and spirituality are not always the same thing. Which is why lots of people, me included, are turned off by Anne Lamott's religious stuff--she mixes the two up hopelessly. When she writes about writing, she is centered. When she's off being religious, she's all over the place.

But I digress.

I fixed "satori on prayer"

so if you already read it, and it intrigued you at all, read the slightly edited (with links and accurate quote) version, below.

Satori on prayer

The most "awakening" chapter for me in Kidd's When the Heart Waits is "Concentrated Stillness." Epigraph: "There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian's prayer." -- Evelyn Underhill

Kidd's is a Christian take on prayer as what the waiting heart does, but Buddhist meditation is the same thing, and relationships with the almighty being in other faiths is, too.

Matthew 26:36 Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His disciples, "Sit here while I go over there and pray."

Yet, "so little attention is paid in our culture to the value of waiting." (p. 123) And so says William Bridges in Transitions: "...transition is a kind of street-crossing procedure. ...move on to the other side as fast as you can. And whatever you do, don't sit down on the center line to think things over!"(Bridges, 1980 ed., p. 112) For Bridges, as for Kidd, waiting through the stages is the Way.

Wondering why she couldn't pray as she was in her dark night led Kidd to a satori: Seeing her reflection in the glass door through which was a foggy night, it came. "I was praying. My still heart, my silence, the very posture of waiting against a backdrop of darkness was my prayer." (p. 126)

Another echo, in Eliot's "Burnt Norton" (my undergraduate thesis was on "Four Quartets"): "Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is" --> Kidd's "prayer of waiting." And, to belabor allusive points, isn't this what Waiting for Godot is about?

More on Tolstaya story

Another GF wrote about Tolstaya's story: "There are so many clues given to us about how to live our lives, but we are blind to them all if not most of them.

'Because we are just as blind--no, a thousand times blinder than that old man in the wheelchair. We hear whispers but we plug our ears; we are shown but we turn away. We have no faith: we're afraid to believe, because we're afraid that we'll be deceived. We are certain that we're in the tomb. We are certain that there's nothing in the dark. There can't be anything in the dark.'

Everything is in the light, but we have to open our eyes to see them, eh."

The story shines many lights!

Writing Stories

I'm one of 284 writers who didn't make it into the winners' circle for Short Shorts. Reading through these, I learn something about writing fiction.....the contemplative mode doesn't work unless for a specific type of fiction; one needs characters and conflict! This takes imagination that reaches into another life rather than navel-gazing. The inner-life blog's gotta be the navel-gazer and outward the direction for other writing. I remember sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens and looking at people and writing details about the characters in my novel. But even in what I wrote in the early chapters, the dilemma took away from the people, even though some of the people are pretty cool as characters. And, the scary thing is that the dilemma is the same one as in the inner-life blog.

Giving away light

Tatyana Tolstaya's story in the March 12th New Yorker, "See the Other Side," illuminated another corner of my waiting heart. The interview of the author by the NY fiction editor shone with the light of alien interpretations. The author and the editor had takes on the story, not like mine of finding the man in darkness tossing out light for others, such a hopeful thought, like maybe the waiting heart can lighten the lives of others, too. "He throws coins into the darkness, and from the darkness sounds a voice that tells him, as much as it is possible, about the great comfort of beauty." I love that sentence, but the phrase left out is what rings in my waiting heart: "He throws coins into the darkness, [making corners of it light up for others], and from the darkness sounds a voice that tells him, as much as it is possible, about the great comfort of beauty."

The part about his getting a reward for the giving away of light and the illumination of beauty for others bothers me. Author's intention and reader's need diverge in the space between words.

Chapel Speeches and "Stuff"

Still trying to make something of my state of mind, reading Sue Monk Kidd's "When the Heart Waits"--about her mid-life crisis, but it applies just as well to the crisis of entering The Third Age, or some major life transition and questioning. I kept thinking of a chapel speech I gave, on my birthday, around age 40, about mid-life crisis, Dante's "dark wood" that he wrote at the beginning of the "The Divine Comedy" (beginning of the Inferno), when he was age 37-42. Going into the crisis is an inferno, and coming out must be like paradiso....never thought about it like that.

So, being in the house but not on duty in the morning today, I got out my chapel speech file to find that one, and put the whole mess in order. I had wanted to have them printed up and bound in a book (I even got a how-to manual on handmade books Japanese-style) to give key people before I left, and I never did it. Now I really see what a job it would be (should have done it then when I could have gotten former students to help type/translate!!). Anyway, it turns out that I have 30 chapel speeches in my file, 15 of which are in Japanese. From 1976 to 1996. I am sure that is not all of them, but just the ones I still have. So I sorted, and threw out extra stuff not needed, and kept the speeches and a little of the extra stuff. I still wish I would "publish" them . . . but more than that. I wondered about not remembering the start and end (how useful a journal would be!)--I sort of think I remember feeling that I was "accepted" even if the "wrong" religion in '76, and that something stopped my being asked in the late 90s.

Anyhow, a larger question arose....."stuff." I felt very "attached" to those 30 speeches, and looked through all of them, some a lot because of reordering and getting items together that had been scattered. They are a link in my "identity." As is all the other "stuff" I am still holding on to because I have a place to keep it for the moment. So the crossroads is coming---what to do with the "stuff"---will I get to enough enlightenment not to need it, to have an identity without it, to know that no one else will ever read it and understand me, and throw it away wholesale? Will I hang on to it, believing it is "me" and someone else will throw it out wholesale? What is its role in my life at I start towards age 70? Where will I keep it? What is its real position in my life?

Of course the ideal would be to retire to a place to live and muse and browse through and read and share and toss. But the ideal ain't the reality. So, a question that has been looming since six months after I got here almost three years ago.....and looms a little bigger and with a longer shadow now: what to do with the "stuff." One item of crone wisdom I have never seen anyone talk about.

Mindfulness

Buddha listed four "distortions of mind," "four basic ways we misconstrue our experience," according to the current Utne Reader. The fourth brought me up short: "The most detrimental distorted view sees a self in the body and mind." There is no real, enduring "me," and no findable essence in us or others. This is hard to grasp, and must take some deep reflection and guidance to actually grasp it, yet mindfulness of the opposite of this distortion, which is selflessness, makes perfect sense in all the world's religions. So the celebration of "the real me" that I keep rabbiting on about is off the mark, and the renunciation I've been so proud of means something different; it means "having a powerful wish to be free from" the four distortions.

I wondered if "mindfulness" meant also "paying attention." I always wonder at how people in this house remember every detail . . . like our stop at the Double Musky Inn in summer 2006, the last "outing" we had....I forgot...but I remember sitting at the bar and eating appetizers, but not what they were. The people in this house remember everything we ate that day! Perhaps the fact that I do not remember much of my life is connected to my not having been mindful throughout it.

I don't know where to put this, so I will put it here. Louise Hay's morning tape says we need to let the universe do its job; all we need to do is have positive, loving thoughts, forgive everyone, and be kind to ourselves mentally. When things here are as they are, I find it so hard to do all three, but in a murder mystery I just escaped into, Eve Dallas heroine, there is a sentence that I need to memorize for my positive, loving thoughts about the people in this house: "You do what's right, you do what matters, whatever it takes."

I think mindfulness is going to be as hard as everything else involved in the waiting heart's eventually emerging into a halfway decent butterfly. And I am frustrated that there is no humor in this post . . . blogs are, like, required to have humor. Oh well . . .

Self-Indulgent Day

A day of self-indulgence is liable to be a happy day.

A walk around the basement in the morning, listening to an audio tape from the library gives energy and fun, leftover lunch of African peanut chicken with mango chutney is delicious, a new mind map with a photo as the center starting point, a photo of the terrasse at La Rotonde with me sitting in a chair there made and printed, a poem to enter in a contest ready to submit, an hour's A&E DVD of a favorite author's book watched in the afternoon, and, if I can stay awake, the first part of "Memoirs of a Geisha," so long awaited (hated the book, but the film looks wonderful), for late tonight? . . . did the indulgences come from some sort of calm center that is happening in the waiting heart? I did not go out in the car, because I had a horrendous experience when the accelerator wouldn't work yesterday, for the second time. No one else here can replicate the situation. So "lockdown."

For the first time since I have been here, a day of "lockdown" was a day of self-indulgence and, so far, before the whole evening of caregiving begins, a day of well-being here in this house. The first. The niggling question: Is this another enthusiasm (in the Jonathan Edwards sense)? Am I a "mikka bouzu" (a 3-day monk, the person who enthusiastically enters a monastery only to leave 3 days later)? What is the inner work that was done today? How will I do on a challenging day? If I hew to the work, will challenging days just be challenging and not devastating?

Stay tuned.

False Selves

Sue Monk Kidd gives a chapter to false and true selves, Chapter 3, early on: "In March my thoughts turned more and more to the transformation that takes place within the waiting heart. What are the changes and growth I am being asked to undergo? What is the movement that is happening inside of me, and where do I begin?"

It's just started being March, and I wondered about false selves while I put off writing to my blog--I thought that blogs were false selves because I cannot really write what is in my thoughts, I must be public with something not boring and whiny. Then, I thought that this blog was made to help fashion the true selves that are hidden under the clinging to the false, because the false ones are so familiar and it is so comfortable to wear them. That they create misery is just part of the package, misery is the Order of Things. But, when a day's gift is that I say, at the end of it, 'today I felt like --me-- again,' I see the true vs. false selves. What Kidd doesn't go into, is why we need false selves under certain circumstances. And that is where Byron Katie (thank you, Maurice Leconte) comes in. False selves must exist because of what Katie calls 'being in other people's business.' It is being reactive.

True selves must be when we hew to nothing but the voice within, when what others do or say does not change how we see ourselves, and then, the other learning curve, since last November 16th (borrowing of first of audio tapes from library), is controlling that voice, i.e., thoughts. But the controlling of the thoughts comes before hewing to the true self's voice. And controlling the familiar misery-making thoughts is hard because it takes us as actor on center stage off somewhere dimmer.

March comes in like a lion in the inner world, roaring at all the false selves. Will it go out like a lamb, with a more precious true self?

Lent

Google Docs keeps eating my posts before I can publish them......so reconstruction is the order of the evening.......maybe reconstruction is the theme of this whole blog. . . .

What I wrote to go up today was about Lent, and I do not remember any of it . . . yes, Ash Wednesday was a week ago, but I only read Kathleen Norris' "Detachment" chapter last night. During a crisis in her life, she was staying with Benedictines near a hospital and came to a meal to find the table decorated for Mardi Gras. "We [one of the sisters] talked about Lent," Kathleen wrote, and she told me that for most of her life she had considered it only in punitive terms, as a time of self-denial. "Now," she said, "I still fast, but my reasons for fasting have changed." She hoped to recover Lent as an aspect of spring itself, a time of waiting, but also of burgeoning hopes.

And so the chord struck with "When the Heart Waits," which I have had to put down. Having read it, the sense is, "OK, I get it. . . ." But the waiting continues and the three-day weekend looming. So, I thought of observing Lent, at least somewhat. Being conscious of a kind of fasting, of giving up some things in order to think about others.

And that may take me back to "When the Heart Waits" . . .

Echoes

"When you feel like that, you often meet what you feel," said Leopold Bloom.

Kidd quotes Rollo May: "In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. It takes courage to let go and yield yourself to the changes that take place in the chrysalis. It takes courage to become who you are."

A short while earlier, reading Anne Perry, Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould: "She was afraid of what the answer would be, but she had always believed courage to be the cornerstone of all virtues. Without it integrity perished; even love could not survive, because love was risk, and somewhere, at some time or place, it would always hurt."

Reading When the Heart Waits, echoes sound often. This shows it's is the right time to get into this work; but sticking with it. . . . it will take courage.

Like my ally, Nausicaa.

Sue and Kathleen

When I finished When the Heart Waits, I dipped into it for a few days. Then, I sat at the little round table where I read and looked at the three books stacked there for many days now. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, that I have had for many years without reading much of it. Caroline Myss, Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, given me by another friend in 2002 and not much used because one needs a pencil and paper to do the work. And a comic murder mystery.

I picked up Amazing Grace, a dictionary-format book, with about two pages per entry. First, I chose "Detachment," then "Prayer," then "Bible," then "Anger," then "Seeking."

The first one I chose, "Detachment," was written as Lent began . . . and I realized Lent was a week old now, but that I could use it to work with the "waiting" I am doing (and the weight I have to shed . . . had been doing focused positive thinking and believed I must be 147 lbs., with 7 to drop to goal; lo and behold, I weigh 157! It is time for Lent!)

One of the surprising things was that things Norris said about prayer, for example, were just what Kidd was saying. I re-stumble on the same concepts, and know their truth.

The bad news is that living them is not as easy as it seems while sitting in the chair at the round table reading about them.

Stay tuned!

A new book

My good friend sent me a book quite unexpectedly. When the Heart Waits, by Sue Monk Kidd, from 1990. Seventeen years ago this book came out! And it is about mid-life crisis and I am well into Third Age. Hmmm . . . but I dipped into it, because my good friend is never wrong. I surfaced at page 31, and did not pick up my constant-companion-murder-mystery until I finished the book a week later. How well this book fits me!

It makes my long (nearly three years now) wait and my complaints about darkness, and nothing happening, and vital-life-in-hiding take on meaning. I always loved St. John of the Cross and his dark night of the soul, and wonder why I did not keep that book. Suddenly my long sojourn in what I have been calling "a small, dark place" made sense. Kidd quotes Eliot, "Four Quartets"; I did my B.A. thesis on this.

I found meaning. I found direction. I settled down. I felt calm. I started opening the book to random pages. I say "thank you" to my good friend.

Onward.